Certainly is a radius on the neck for a veneer fretboard, how novel! Here's what it looks like when finished on the right, compared to the 'standard' on the left (instead of 1,000 words).

Thanks for that Nick......definitely, a picture tells a thousand words. You just taught me something new today. Now I understand why the first fretboard split prior to the water treatment. Interesting.

Being an old bastard who has played tons of old Fender basses, new ones and built quite a few from parts providers as well as recently built a few from scratch, I have noticed a sonic difference between a slab rosewood board and a radiused rosewood board. The radiused boards definitely have a nicer almost intangible "feel" to them, but sonically, the radiused board gives a slightly brighter tone all round. Slab boards tend to soak up a little more of the top end brightness that stems from the maple neck beneath. It varies from neck to neck, but is definitely noticeable, and I have a lot of guitar building buddies who really don't like slab rosewood boards. As far as basses go, I guess if you had a rosewood slab board, and it sounded a little dead to your ears you could always go for a shorter value capacitor (0.02 as opposed to 0.047) to brighten things up a little or choose stainless roundwounds over nickel...
Having said that, I don't think I've ever been lucky enough to play a pre-63 rosewood slab board Fender bass, so I couldn't comment on those. No doubt they have their own unique vintage tonal charm...
And in the end, chicks dig bass because it hits them in the midriff, not because that guy has a radiused fingerboard over the guy in the previous band who used a slab board.

Anyhoo...onto another progress report:
The hot water treatment on the veneer fretboard worked like a charm - an absolutely flawless adhesion.

Next comes alignment and neck pocket fitting.
Often a tedious and time consuming task. But vital for making an instrument true.
On building the body, I added two tiny pinholes on the body centreline at the neck pocket and the bridge, before painting which made aligning that much easier.

And then the crappy job of routing more of the pickguard - my own first world problem by creating pickguard stock out of fiberglass.
Neck pocket to pickguard fit is of course done by not cutting the neck pocket section until the heel is ready to be fitted to the pocket. Once that task is completed, we remove the neck, and double-tape the guard into position and use the follow-bearing bit in the trimmer to make the perfect fit on both the neck pocket and pickup cutout.

Next will be fret-slotting, trimming down headstock to thickness and transition curve from nut to headstock face. Bang in some frets and flip the neck over and carve. And a bunch of brass shielding fabrication for all 3 cavitiies, and an aluminum shield as well...